


The Eulogy of Harley Warren

by completetheory



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-Canon, soft lovecraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:34:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24611599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/completetheory/pseuds/completetheory
Summary: What happened to Carter's good friend Harley Warren after he stopped answering in The Statement of Randolph Carter?And who was that on the phone? (Who else?)
Relationships: Nyarlathotep/Harley Warren
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MadScientific](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadScientific/gifts).



"You fool, Warren is dead!"

On the other end of the line, the speaker heard the receiver drop. Had Randolph Carter fainted? Ran away? Victimized himself to the 'amorphous shadows' that danced in frenzied delight at the grinning Cheshire moon? 

The shadows loved the waning of the light as sorely as the speaker loved the last notes of a favorite melody. They would do no harm, not even to one like Carter, but then, as Lucretius warned, when faced with a fear of the unknown, all humans were as children, _'fearing everything in the blind darkness'._

Nyarlathotep lowered the borrowed receiver and turned to face the shaking figure on the floor. 

"Harley Warren." 

The mortal flinched as if struck a physical blow, and Nyarlathotep bit his tongue to keep from laughing. Really? This was the mighty occultist? So many of them struck a match only to drop the flame in terror, inches from the mastery of a new and wonderful tool whose applications were limitless.

"Randolph Carter is a rank coward. He will not come to save you." 

Warren found his tongue in record time, though to the would-be magus, it must have felt like eons. "Kill me now and be done with it, then, and leave him be!"

The adrenaline had well and truly flooded the wetware of Warren's jellied consciousness, then, and he had heard only the name of his friend, not the accusation that followed. Nyarlathotep heard no footfalls to prove him mistaken, and his empty socketed gaze, with twinned lich candle flames remained on Warren. 

"Who says I mean to kill you?" Nyarlathotep dropped to a crouch, fluid headspines flexing behind him. In this gaunt form, he had brought to satisfying end two graverobbers - or would he? in future... Ah, yes. That would be a few years yet.

In any case, the wight-skin he wore like clothes was less wholesome than the Atlantean mage, or the scientific showman of cities doomed to nuclear winter. He could not blame Warren for a fright, or for thinking the worst. He was patient, as the surge of fight-or-flight reached its peak and the occultist shook violently against the sad burial vault.

The alien remained perfectly still in the semi-darkness, feeling the caresses of the anti-luminous beings of dark matter. They moved like an aura around him, blissful in their quantum-level disorder, but as he ceased to observe them, they quieted and became nondescript in the chamber. 

Peace, and he let Warren see the full extent of his shape. A hollow, gutless chest, a great smile stretching back under those ghost candle eyes. His skin was dark brown, leathery and strong.

"What are you?" Warren whispered in the silence between them, licking dry lips, frantic. The panic chemicals had peaked now. If Nyarlathotep was patient, familiarity would come with handmaiden contempt, and render Warren more... amenable to listening. 

"I am the tesseract." Nyarlathotep offered, playfully, "I am the devil. Maxwell's daemon; the presence under the basement stairs. You thrilled at the notion of finding me, once." 

The trembling slowed, but thankfully, Warren stayed down, unconvinced of his ability to stand under his own power. He kept making micro-glances to the exit, which Nyarlathotep conspicuously was not blocking. 

"You - you told Carter I was dead." 

"Harley Warren died the moment he stepped into this vault. With every movement, you shed pieces of the old. What is the new? Now that you have seen these?" 

The quantum shadows writhed at his invitation, a hundred thousand possibilities that fractured into further paths the longer a human eye sought to map them. They were endless ripples on the surface of the sea, atoms pulled back and forth with lunar devotion, the smallest speck of the grand cosmic machine. 

Such accounts of scale were not well-handled by the majority of this species. Warren, given the breather, seemed to be faring a little better, but when no answer was forthcoming, Nyarlathotep spoke again.

"Why are you afraid? What did you expect to find down here?"

"I don't know." 

"Then you can't be disappointed." 

Warren laughed. It was a good sound. Not the desperate laugh of terror, or the harsh bark of indignant awareness that the butt of the universe was he. No, this was a laugh of genuine tension relief, and Warren quaked with its welcome energy for several moments.

"No, I, I can't." He admitted, taking out the book, one of the Nameless Recordations, the Dolus Malus. Moving with uncharacteristic slowness, the alien who was the heart and soul of the cosmic center took the book from Warren, and set it carefully on the burial tomb without opening it.

"Not my best work." Nyarlathotep admitted, but the action brought him closer to the occultist, and with no harm to mortal bone or skin. 

"You-- wrote--"

"Yesss." Now a hint of boredom came into the alien's aura, their eyes kindling brighter, "I wrote several of your books. None of the Grimoires, though. I also created a variant on minchiate, but no one seems to want to play it with me." 

Warren simply could not biologically maintain his fear without an active threat for longer than about fifteen minutes, and the distress was ebbing away more with every passing moment. 

"Let me show you something." Nyarlathotep offered, "It won't hurt." 

He turned away from his guest, lifting up his hands, and the shadows writhed away to disappear into the crevices as every empty torch sconce flared to life with corpsefire. 

"So I am born on Earth, pouring the essence of my Self into the clay vessel of flesh, so too must I die, and be reborn, climbing the burial steps of the birth canal... the womb of the tomb. Breathe." 

Warren sucked in a breath reflexively. 

"You autonomously strive. But truth is so much, greater - this tongue is insufficient - the viriditas--" He stopped again. "Iä, ur'arwi." 

Warren, like most occultists, spoke at least limited Aklo. "You hunger for the... gold standard of chaos?" 

"There can be fear, and there can be curiosity, but not together. There can be fear, and there can be learning, but not together. Choose fear and live in ignorance. Choose curiosity, choose learning... and become." 

The mortal whispered, "Become what?" 

"I don't know." Nyarlathotep's voice lit with energy, delight, "Higher dimensions are perfection, unchanging - dead, like this place. Down here, you are dreaming. When you emerge, you will become... something. Even I can't tell you what."

Nyarlathotep reached toward the mortal, with a long fingered hand. Warren - hesitating for only a moment more - took his hand. 

"And now, Harley Warren is truly dead," Nyarlathotep squeezed the offered hand, "Long live Harley Warren."


	2. The Burial of Harley Warren

"That thing about Plato's cave."

Warren stood before the onyx altar of the microwave background radiation's riotous roar. The Dolus Malus was open on the altar before him, covered in scrawled notes. 

Nyarlathotep himself had not appeared. Precedent suggested he might not. He was not bound to the same solar and lunar rules as the other ancients, but he also did not always find situations interesting enough to make a personal appearance.

Warren spoke to the little effigy of him anyway, the one that stood in a robe, pulling a cloak about its face mysteriously. 

"I hate it. The cave implies the world is empty and waiting to be explored. But in reality, the planet is crawling with people who don't understand, and who rush about their petty lives from one distraction to another. When I try to talk to them they treat me like I'm mad, they shrink away from me or call the police. I've tried to talk to them online - it's like they can sense something is wrong, and no one answers after a little while." 

"You _are_ mad." Nyarlathotep's voice came from somewhere behind him. Warren turned, but none of the ancient's thousand forms were anywhere in evidence. 

"I know the truth." Warren contested. "That time is a lie, that death is a fiction, that morality is a dioptra poised for coordinates for which humanity lacks the theodolite." 

"See, it's words like dioptra and theodolite that make people stop replying to your emails." Nyarlathotep oozed from cracks in the shadowy wall, climbing up the onyx altar and perching at the top. "You now speak a language few other apes are interested in. It divides you, naturally." 

"I'm so unhappy." Warren wiped at his eyes, furious at the weakness, "I thought finding the truth would satisfy me. I go weeks without bathing... I forget to eat. I can't work - the rigor of daily life is almost too much to bear. What good is paying bills, and socializing and maintaining superficial friendships?" 

The god had a dozen eyes this time, but none of them held any pity. They simply watched. 

"How do I escape the cave?" Warren met those eyes much more courageously than the first time they'd met. 

"I can't teach you that." Nyarlathotep said, with instant authority on the matter.

"How --what _is_ the cave, then, truly?" Warren cast about, "I know that the illusions, and the obsessions that fools have thinking illusion is reality. Help me. Define it to me in another way." 

"The third dimension." 

Silence, and when the ancient decided Warren would not ask again, Nyarlathotep crawled broken-backed from down the altar to stretch liquid across the floor. 

"Suddenly a light is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another." The ancient said, in the manner of a quote.

"Who said that?" Warren watched Nyarlathotep do a complete circle around him, followed by another quarter of one, to stand right at his left side.

"Plato." Nyarlathotep said, as though it was self evident. He altered trajectory a bit and came up behind Warren, leaning on his shoulders like an old drunken companion. "Do you know why you're sad, Harley Warren? You sound as though you almost do. It is the paradox of the universe from the very first moment of Azathoth's unholy and profane sleep, and the abiding love of the empty void." 

"I'm 'sad' because I have discovered truth is useless without anyone to share it with." Warren didn't shrink from the touch. 

"Excellent! That didn't take long." Nyarlathotep sounded as though he thought it would. "Now. Why are you still going by that old name? Who named you? Your mother? Your father? Don't you deserve a new name, to go forth with?"

Warren paused. "I -...suppose..." 

"Bury Harley Warren, as I encouraged you to. In a pauper's grave, to suit his pauper's knowledge and ambition. Free yourself of his small mind, seeking occult secrets to be a teacher of wayward pupils. That dream is the cave." 

Nyarlathotep pulled away, and began to slide back toward the shadows from whence they had come. 

"Wait--" Harley, with urgency, nearly knocked down the statuette, and stopped to catch it, though the wood was scarely like to be damaged by a fall. "--Wait, please, I still need your help." 

"Watch. Don't try to own. Don't try to influence. Just watch." Nyarlathotep tossed back over one shoulder, blood dripping head tendril slick against his own cheek, "We're all Azathoth, really. Imagine how alone you'd be if you didn't even have me to talk to."

Warren watched him step into and through the shadow, and sat with the statuette, in silence, until the sun rose over the horizon and found him sleeping there against the wall. When he woke, he spent a little while writing names in the margins of the Dolus Malus, and settled, at length, on 'Azoth'.


	3. Pupation

In his travels, Azoth first experienced the fear of death, underground, where he had encountered Nyarlathotep. Then, he knew the agony of alienation from humankind, when he realized that he spoke in English tongues none but he could understand, or cared for. 

He sought a trinity of suffering, however, instinctively aware that the universe moved in triangular patterns of threes. He discarded the words 'holy' and 'unholy'. Anything binary, he threw away. 

He knew that the Gods were not Gods, now. And he knew that they were not evil. Had he come with intent to rob that grave, and Nyarlathotep existed in his hound-faced form, a lesser fool might have cried foul, thought it was some delight of Nyarlathotep's in karmic retribution. Surely nothing _they_ did was wicked.

Azoth thought involuntarily of the books he'd read as a child - the curses attached to stolen sacred objects and books, or thrown at the feet of those who committed mob murder or enslavement, always the perpetrator fearing the mystic reprisal of those they knew to be their victims. He remembered too, dimly, a story of a doctor called to a mansion in the middle of a night to assist with a childbirth. Once the doctor became aware that the two parents-to-be were vampires, he went berserk, instantly staking the mother and attacking the father with silver scalpels, only to fall foul of the baby lurking somehow in the car as he went to leave.

The story was meant to be horror because, Azoth supposed, vampires were 'innately horrible'. But it was far more horrible to reflexively destroy another based solely on their species. It was more horrible to be so caught up in killing frenzy that one _forgot_ an _infant_ that may, by some miracle of god, have been living offspring which he might have valued more.

That story had stuck with Azoth uncomfortably as a child, because he was always drawn to the monstrous, and the weird, and the occult, and he felt a kinship with the polite vampire father, the struggling vampire mother - and quite apart from the 'shock reveal', he had privately guessed their monster roles long before the writer revealed them. 

All this was somewhat topical. Azoth was about to take the next step in becoming what he already was inside. A monster.

The ritual circle, with its purifying liquid fire, burned his skin and melted his flesh as he stood in the center. He felt no pain, just a curious interest in how the bones of his fingers could still move with no tendons to accompany them, held together at each joint, as if magnetized. 

"Amazing." He spoke liplessly, looking up and then wobbling toward the river, like a newborn colt. The face that stared back was fleshless, a skull, and its fixed grin felt fond, as if evolution had put it there to reassure that there was nothing in mortality to discomfit. 

Azoth still wore the rags of a traveller, dirty and falling to bits, but he no longer noticed or cared for trivialities like this; he sought still higher vistas. But he avoided the cities, now. If anyone saw him like this, they would impede him, and he was for the first time well and truly alone.

He did find another cemetery shortly, not quite as haunted as the first one had been, but instinctively he now knew Nyarlathotep was everywhere. In the watermill, in the hollow oak. In the moon's beautiful cheshire smile. And the Chaos entity was present, too, as he knelt by the grave of a suicide victim, and touched the granite carving. 

Occult abilities lent Azoth some limited understanding of the world around him, things that an ordinary person would not know. He could not call himself truly telepathic, but his intuition had been heightened to astounding levels, and when he rose again, he brought wildflowers to the grave and laid them there with care.

"I'm sorry." He told the headstone, and read the name aloud into the night, moving from grave to crooked grave, approaching in his meandering skeletal way a certain specific crypt. He needed a shelter - it was a windy night and there was no way to scatter ceremonial dust outside without losing the shape immediately. The door gave way in splinters and then he re-set it on its hinges.

"Apologies for the disturbance," He called out, amused. The voice that answered him nearly stopped the withered heart still dangling arterially from his ribs.

"Not to worry, I was only resting my eyes." 

Nyarlathotep unfolded from a gap in the shadows. "Hello, Acolyte." 

Azoth relaxed. "Ah... Bringer of Strange Joys. I hoped to find you. I was about to call you." 

"I move where and whence I please, and I please myself in observing you. Why did you need me?" 

The sepulchure, so like the first time the old, dead occultist had met him, now felt warm and familiar, cozy. There was veneration with these bones, much beloved individuals who were clustered together as silent audience to their discussion. 

Azoth no longer feared the dark, or the dead, or the demonic. He understood now that these things had been told to him as frightening to keep him under control. That the 'light' was no better, and in some cases a good deal more merciless; that the living were dangerous, and the angelic were oft depicted crushing underfoot their enemies, simultaneously portrayed as deadly and helpless--

"Azoth?" 

He warmed with the use of that name, so pleased by it. "Yes. Nyarlathotep. I am here - I wanted to ask you, beg you, grant me entry into the Dreamlands." 

Nyarlathotep looked ...thoughtful. "Why?" 

Azoth had not expected to have to explain, thinking it self evident. "I can know only some of the truth in the waking world. But in sleep, in the subconscious, in dreams, I might--"

"Ahhh... Jung. Another Buddha on the road that you must kill." Nyarlathotep disdained, crouching back on the tomb which he had claimed for his own perch, "Do you know who sleeps here, the eternal sleep? Underneath me? Do you know why you came to this place, to call for me?" 

As with so many rhetorical questions, Nyarlathotep simply continued on with only a moment's pause for answer. "To visit the Dreamlands and speak to the Gods, you don't need my help. You need only to sleep the astral sleep. This is a power all humans, even brainless ingrates, can manage." 

This then, was why Nyarlathotep was not a god. He did not seek to enslave others to his guidance, to diminish their personal agencies in 'granting' miracles or advice or absolution. He merely... conversed. Like a friend. 

"Thank you. --Who sleeps there?" 

Nyarlathotep leapt lightly off the stone tomb, "Go on." 

Tentatively, Azoth pushed the heavy lid to the side, and with Nyarlathotep's inhuman strength, managed to remove it completely. It was empty.

"You knew I would come." Azoth determined, delighted. "Thank you, Mighty Messenger, thank you. I will sleep, and enter the Dreamlands and discover the way of things, and honor you with the universe's truth." 

"Honor yourself." Nyarlathotep returned, and lifted the lid over him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story Azoth "remembers" is called "Birth of a Monster", and was actually published in a magazine called "Super Science Fiction", in 1959. That makes it anachronistic for Azoth's youth, but oh well.


End file.
